My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? 2 For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, 3 and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” 4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? – James 2:1-5
James is an interesting, short, book of the Bible that has a load of information about living a Christian life. This book is attributed to James who identifies himself as a ‘brother of Jesus.’ This book, while fairly straight forward is very pious in its teachings, leading us to understand that we cannot have faith without works. Therefore, our actions our works are as important to our Christian life as is our inward faith.
I, personally, like the book of James, but also have a hard time with it. My difficulty, is mostly because of the conviction it gives to our daily actions. Like so many of us, we like to think we are doing good, we are striving after our love for God, and our love for neighbor, but then we read the book of James, and all of sudden (at least for me) we get that conviction, that we haven’t gotten it quite right yet.
In these verse in the second chapter, we find one of those moments of conviction. These words are about the little judgements we make in our daily interactions. We may do our best to treat everyone equally, but we all know that there are times when we do not. It may be for a number or reasons that we don’t, perhaps we are zoned out in our own little world, perhaps we have had a hard day and take it out on someone, perhaps someone looked at us wrong. Any number of reasons for our little judgements, but particularly, here, James calls us to look at the way we treat those who appear to be of wealth and those who appear to be poor.
It calls us back to remember that Jesus said in Matthew 5, “blessed are the poor…” When we search deep within, we find that there is a poverty in our souls as we desire something more than this life has to offer. That place is blessed by Jesus alone. It is the place where we begin to understand the love of God through Jesus, and hopefully recognize that same need to for God’s love in others.
God’s love is the ultimate sacrifice for all our sins and transgressions. It is only through His blood that we can even think about having the opportunity to rejoice with Him in the glory of Heaven. Though we are weak in our humanity, and often judge others, we must learn to see others through God-eyes in order to understand how we can love with Christ-love.
Grace & Peace,
Sam